Now that OnLive is live, details have emerged on Eurogamer.net outlining how much games will cost on the service, in addition to OnLive fees (which are not being charged yet). They show Brain Challenge for $4.99, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin for $19.99, Just Cause 2 for $49.99, and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction for $59.99. Those are all pretty much in line for the prices for those games at retail, except in this case you will need to maintain your OnLive subscription to keep playing these games, and even then, access to these titles is only certain for the next three years, as they all carry a "rental duration" which reads: "Until at least 17th June 2013."

Verno wrote on Jun 22, 2010, 15:31:Much like it is not possible to pirate this content "for now".

It's never going to be possible to pirate this content on a consistent basis. You'd have to steal the source files, and that would require inside help and still be very difficult to do. And that doesn't even consider the technical issue of untying the games to OnLive's hardware and SDK.

Also the "piracy issue" is a relative non-starter on the console side of things for the most part and that's where the lions share of money is in the videogame industry these days.

You are seizing on just one of the problems for game publishers that I mentioned since it is lesser on game consoles than for PC's. Used game sales are certainly a problem to them on video game consoles, and it falls into the same category as piracy.

I can't really agree with that, I think if anything OnLive faces even more obstacles than Steam did.

It faces fewer obstacles because Steam, XBOX Live, etc. paved the way for consumer acceptance of the digital delivery of games. Cloud gaming services like OnLive are simply the next step in that progression.

No one is going to tolerate potentially creating a Steam situation again either, they will not put all of their eggs into one basket.

Game publishers will if they control it. They so want to eliminate paying multiple times to develop the same game, that they would partner with each other to unify gaming under a single platform in the same way that home video is unified on a single standard.

I can't ever see something like this taking over, perhaps down the road as both the technology and infrastructure advances then something akin to OnLive would be offered as a service but even DD is an insignificant portion of revenue compared to the entire retail industry as a whole.

Just look at how relatively quickly Netflix took over the retail video rental industry. OnLive could do the same to the video game industry as well if it gets the funding to support ten of millions of simultaneous users and exclusive game releases. All it takes is one hit game to start the ball rolling. Halo made the XBOX. Half-Life 2 made Steam. A killer game would make Online a success as well.